Tuesday, March 3, 2015

In an ideal world, whenever I was invited to give a talk or a lecture, it would go something like this:
I would spend a few weeks thinking about what I wanted to say. After a
sufficient percolation period, I would sit at my computer and sweat out
a complete draft.
Then I would spend months revising it, shoring up the structure,
getting rid of ideas that didn’t fit, and dumping whatever seemed
extraneous. I would add anecdotes, vivid images, and sparkling, funny
phrases. I would hunt down -ly adverbs that seemed weak or lazy, and go on a search-and-destroy mission for needless this, that’s, and there’s. Finally, having driven myself crazy with perfectionist anxiety, I would tell myself I was ready.

Online education continues to grow (though the breakneck pace seems to have slowed a bit of late) and an increasing number of college and university students want to take online courses. At the same time, faculty members seem reluctant to teach these courses.
This poses a conundrum for universities, and raises an important
question: What, if anything, would make the prospect of teaching online
more appealing to faculty? (In the first part in this series, I explored how MOOCs can encourage good -- and bad -- habits for professors.)
While pondering this question, I had the opportunity to work with a
faculty member who is developing a MOOC. (MOOCs, for the uninitiated,
are massive open online courses. They are created by faculty from
various institutions and offered, usually for free, through outfits like
Coursera, Udacity and EdX.) The faculty member’s enthusiasm for this
project highlighted to me several advantages MOOCs have when it comes to
motivating faculty interest in online teaching. It’s worth looking at
what these advantages are and considering what they can teach us about
faculty motivation to teach online.

It was there and then it wasn’t: the University of Tennessee System’s
plan, announced in a news release, to “de-tenure” some faculty members
as part of its new cost-savings strategy. While the university
has backed down on that specific language amid faculty outcry
-- focusing instead on a “comprehensive review” of existing tenure and
posttenure review processes -- some Tennessee professors say any plan by
any name to strip professors of tenure, especially one linked to
financial, not academic issues, smells sour.
The “de-tenure” idea was proposed last week after Joe DiPietro,
system president, outlined the framework for a new financial model to
the Board of Trustees for the university system's five campuses.
“We are not insolvent or in financial ruin,” DiPietro told the board.
“The only way to preclude tuition increases is to fix it ourselves. It
is about maintaining quality and moving ahead. We will be a different
organization in the next four to five years.”

The chancellor of the University of Wisconsin at Madison came under
fire last month for publicly admitting to a tactic common among her
counterparts at research universities. To keep top faculty members from
accepting outside offers, she sometimes will reduce their teaching
loads. Critics seized on Chancellor Rebecca Blank’s comments as an
example of what’s wrong with higher education, saying that rewarding
good professors by reducing their exposure to students was a kind of
perverse incentive -- and an expensive one, to boot. But how fair is the
criticism, and just how common and how bad -- if at all -- is the
practice? It depends on whom you ask.
Blank’s comments came during an interview with TheWall Street Journal last month about Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s proposed $300 million higher education budget cuts
and suggestion that faculty members teach more to offset the shortfall.
The chancellor called the advice unrealistic, saying it demonstrated
Walker’s “serious misunderstanding” about faculty workloads and
management. As an example, she said that 15 percent of faculty members
approach Madison’s administration each year with better offers from
other colleges and universities, and that she sometimes reduces their
course loads to convince them to stay.

In 1999, down in the sub-basement of
the University of Minnesota library, I found the Exuviae Sacrae
Constantinopolitanae, a 19th-century two-volume collection of medieval
sources on the sack of Constantinople in 1204. Each of the sources told the
story of the transportation of Christian relics from Constantinople to Western
Europe. I was quickly riveted by the idiosyncrasies of the various accounts and
wondered what they might reveal about the constructed memories of an important
event.

So I wrote a short paper about the
collection, then a long paper, then got a grant to look at the manuscripts, and
eventually used the topic for my dissertation, which I defended in 2006. The
next fall, I started a tenure-track job at a teaching-oriented small Roman
Catholic university on the outskirts of Chicago.

In 1999, down in the sub-basement of the University of Minnesota library, I found the Exuviae Sacrae Constantinopolitanae,
a 19th-century two-volume collection of medieval sources on the sack of
Constantinople in 1204. Each of the sources told the story of the
transportation of Christian relics from Constantinople to Western
Europe. I was quickly riveted by the idiosyncrasies of the various
accounts and wondered what they might reveal about the constructed
memories of an important event.
So I wrote a short paper about the collection, then a long paper, then
got a grant to look at the manuscripts, and eventually used the topic
for my dissertation, which I defended in 2006. The next fall, I started a
tenure-track job at a teaching-oriented small Roman Catholic university
on the outskirts of Chicago.
- See more at: https://chroniclevitae.com/news/925-why-write-a-book#sthash.eNY7knlv.dpuf

The University of Tennessee’s Board of Trustees has triggered
suspicion among faculty members by calling for tenure policies to be
reconsidered as part of a cost-cutting plan.
The system’s administration on Monday retracted from its summary of
the plan language that had especially aroused faculty opposition—a
reference to the potential "enacting of a de-tenure process."
The "de-tenure" reference had helped fan faculty outrage over the plan on Twitter and elsewhere. In a blog post
about the plan, Chad Black, an associate professor of early Latin
American history at the Knoxville campus, asked: "What in the world is a
‘de-tenure process,’ and what place does tenure, a bulwark of academic
freedom and security for the risks of academic training and employment,
have in a conversation on cutting costs and increasing revenues?"

Monday, March 2, 2015

This is the season when many an academic
department is naming a new figurehead for the next academic year. If
you’re one of the rookie managers, you are finding a real dearth of
advice on how to do the job. Your institution may guide new chairs in
the process of tenure and promotion, or on faculty hiring. And you might
get some gentle schooling on annual reviews and the salary matrix, or
lessons in "leadership." But you won’t get much in the way of a
philosophical introduction to the work, broadly conceived, of the
department chair.

Three years ago, I was invited to
testify before the New York City Board of Health about a proposed law to
cap the portion size of sugary drinks served in restaurants. This
request didn’t come as a surprise. After all, I had published several
well-cited articles linking these beverages to childhood obesity.
What did catch me off guard was my reaction: I was horrified at the
thought of taking a public position for or against. I was reminded of
that reaction when I read Andrew J. Hoffman’s recent essay in The Chronicle on how academics need to communicate with the public on a wide range of public-policy issues.
In my field, public health and nutrition, as in many other fields of
science, presentations tend to be rich with data and discussions of
limitations and caveats, almost always closing with the phrase "more
research is needed." Testifying before the board of health, I would have
no such options. Rather I would have five minutes to stake out a clear
position. Yes, I believed, as did virtually all of my colleagues, that
sugary drinks threatened people’s health, but was my belief sufficient
to justify this policy action? Were a handful of longitudinal studies
and two randomized control trials enough evidence?

If there’s anything sadder in academe
today than a blown hiring opportunity, it is the deterioration of
professionalism in the wake of such a loss.
Last year my English department came apart at the seams over a
national search that included an internal applicant and a sizable
population of adjunct faculty members wanting a voice and a vote in the
search. In the year since, our department’s decision making has been
virtually paralyzed by a question that the controversy raised: Who
should weigh in on personnel, curricular, and other matters of
departmental governance?

The median base salary for senior leaders at colleges and
universities has gone up 2.4 percent in 2014-15, the same as the year
before.
Also for the second year in a row, the gains for administrators at
public institutions have slightly outpaced those at private institutions
(2.5 percent to 2.3 percent this year and last). The prior two years,
however, gains were greater at private institutions than at public ones.
These figures come from data being released today by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources.
The following bar chart shows the averages across titles in the survey for all institutions, public and private.

ISIS has declared that a Rhodes College professor -- a key figure in American Islam -- is an apostate who deserves to be killed.
The call came in an article in Dabiq, the magazine of the
extremist Islamic group ISIS. It attacks Muslim leaders who have
criticized the recent murder of the people who worked at Charlie Hebdo,
the French satirical magazine. "There is no doubt that such deeds are
apostasy, that those who publicly call to such deeds in the name of
Islam and scholarship are from the du’āt (callers) to apostasy, and that there is great reward awaiting the Muslim in the Hereafter if he kills these apostate imāms..."

Rate My Professors is a student evaluation site that frustrates many
professors, who say that the nonscientific standards leave faculty
members open to unfair ratings.
Last month, a study documented the extent to which students use different sets of words (many of them with gender implications)
to discuss their male and female professors. Now a new study looks at
how students on Rate My Professors rate instructors who have
Asian-sounding last names, and the results suggest that these
instructors are getting significantly lower scores than those with other
last names in Rate My Professors' categories of clarity and
helpfulness.
The author of the study, who also examined comments students make
about the instructors, said that his findings raise questions about
whether American colleges and universities are as international in
outlook at they boast of being -- and whether Asian instructors are
being reviewed fairly. The study -- "She Does Have an Accent But" -- has
just been published in the journal Language in Society (abstract available here).

The Chronicle of Higher EducationMarch 2nd, 2015
Three higher-education leaders are urging federal lawmakers to repeal
sequestration and increase research funding in the budget for the 2016
fiscal year.
In a letter
on Friday, the presidents of the Association of Public and Land-Grant
Universities, the Association of American Universities, and the American
Council on Education wrote that continued limits on federal investment
in scientific research and higher education would threaten the position
of the United States as the world’s top economic power. ”The solution to
our continuing budget deficits lies not in discretionary spending cuts
but in reforms to mandatory spending and taxation,” wrote Peter
McPherson, Hunter R. Rawlings III, and Molly Corbett Broad, the
respective leaders of the groups.

The Faculty Senate at West Liberty University has voted no confidence in
its president after allegations that he used university resources to
promote a film produced by his company, the CBS affiliate WTRF-TV reports.
The West Virginia Ethics Commission is investigating accusations that
Robin C. Capehart used several different university resources, including
a television station and a credit card, to promote the 2011 film Doughboy, which was made by his company, Flyover Films. Mr. Capehart has denied the allegations.

Nearly three out of four colleges ask applicants a variation of the
question most dreaded by those who have been on the wrong side of the
law: Have you ever been convicted of a crime?
Some colleges are only concerned with violent felonies, others with
misdemeanors or even high-school suspensions. And what they do with that
information, ostensibly gathered only to keep their campuses safe,
varies widely.
Relatively few reject students outright on the basis of criminal
convictions, but many require those applicants to jump through so many
hoops, gathering letters from probation officers and corrections
officials, waiting additional months for committee deliberations, that
the students give up.